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Still, Heidi Hartmann, president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a Washington think tank, said the welfare policies of the ’90s were engineered to support society’s most vulnerable: poor children, who tend to live with their moms.
“The goal was to employ single moms and give those children a better standard of living, and [welfare reform] did that,” Hartmann said. “It did have unintended consequences. All public policies do.”